In May, I bought a ready-to-eat basil plant at Maxi. It had never seen the sun, like thousands, fed and lit with chemicals, just a show. As soon as I planted it in a big pot on my balcony, it exploded and thanked me all summer. I will harvest a huge sheaf before the frost. This basil wanted to live; it was simply not in the desired environment. It was brooding under neon.
I came to the same conclusion about myself last June. I self-diagnosed myself with “smiling depression” (or a burnoutit’s more chic) for weeks, even two months… I checked all the symptoms, except one, the eighth.
— What’s the eighth? a friend asked me, trying to convince me to go smile at a movie premiere.
— My self-esteem is still good…
— That’s great! You see?
— That’s great, indeed. I could kill myself with my head held high.
Fiercely positive people depress me. What makes me feel good are the indignant, the punks and the rebels, the Pierre Falardeau, André Forcier, Alain Deneault, Dahlia Namian, author of The Provocation Society, Martine Delvaux, Spike Lee and Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher with a November face who asserts his anger, his sadness, and impatiently awaits the evening.
“I am generally against the idea of happiness. I don’t particularly want to be happy. I want to be engaged, not suffer too much, and for my life to have meaning,” Slavoj wrote in an issue devoted to good humor in the magazine Philosophywhich my mother gave me.
Well, from there to encouraging depression and neon summer, there is a step that I will not take. And I got out of it rather alone, because everything goes too fast. You have to keep the carousel turning at all costs. It is the dizzying spiral of the big V, that of Speed, even on Vacation. Too bad for the anonymous depressives, the dandelions of sidewalk cracks, the old, the sick, the Slovenians and the homeless, everything that can slow down the relentless race of progress. It is “walk, smile for your selfie or die!”, the law of a so-called modern society. You will excuse me if I have not heard from you.
Every reading is an act of resistance. A well-conducted reading saves from everything, including oneself.
Literature, jams and nature
My devoted family doctor wrote to me that she had been inundated in early August by Debbyher “water” vacation, that she was placing her father in a CHSLD and that COVID had invited itself. I found that her case summed up the times well: climate disruption, overwork, aging population and pandemic. The cocktail that kills. She also mentioned to me that many of her colleagues are in burnout and drop off patients.
I didn’t take pills to get out of my depression/burnout. I took the summer off, I unplugged all the screens (including Netflix) to stop time. And my cure of literature, jams and nature saved me with a capital V.
I read everything I could get my hands on while drinking homemade iced tea. I dove with delight into The Anguish of King Solomon by Romain Gary, bought because of this quote (page 309): “The happy medium. Somewhere between not giving a damn and dying. Between locking yourself away and letting the whole world in. Not hardening yourself but not letting yourself be destroyed either. Very difficult.” Indeed…
Then, in order, I read the Yukon punk Emmanuelle Pierrot (The version that no one cares about), the moving Jean-Philippe Pleau (Duplessis Street), the street sweeper Michel Simonet (A rose and a broom), the popular Ashley Audrain (Whispers), Korean-American Michelle Zauner (Crying at the supermarket), the captivating Delphine de Vigan (Children are kings), the nerd Vaclav Smil (How the World Really Works), the lucid Elizabeth Lemay (The Summer of Anger) and sociologist of poverty and exclusion Dahlia Namian (The Provocation Society).
I could write you a column about each and every one; I loved everything, novels, stories, essays. These not at all vain writers saved me, one word at a time. I was a blotter, a basil plant that thirsted for sunshine.
If Norman Cousins (How I Healed Myself with Laughter) was able to get rid of ankylosing spondylitis considered almost incurable by laughing, books can certainly resuscitate a sagging faith. Booksellers are pharmacists of the soul.
Depressives are much less dangerous than healthy neurotics.
Epidemic of crises
“How much truth can the fragile human soul bear?” wrote Jean Rostand (quoted by Christiane Singer in Where are you running to? Don’t you know that heaven is within you?).
Indeed, denial lies between the words “democracy” and “depression.” The climate crisis, the housing crisis, the inflationary crisis, the opioid crisis; by multiplying crises, we end up integrating the word.
How many people, even strangers, now talk to me about their melancholy! I even have a reader who calls me “doctor” every week. An editor I don’t know wrote to me this week that he was “okay, let’s say” and mentioned the burnout of his blonde. So much the worse for the polished varnish and the appearances of yesteryear.
Around me, the cripples (increasingly numerous) talk about it openly. Everyone exchanges their recipes. I even read in the book of Dr Jimmy Mohamed, a well-known French doctor, that saffron worked wonders against depression. It’s as expensive as a shrink, but perhaps more effective.
People don’t pretend to be depressed, they pretend to be fine.
Life moves fast and we are always a text away from happiness. “The more we try to save time through the frantic race for innovation, the more we feel we are running out of it,” notes Dahlia Namian in her powerful essay, The Provocation Societya title stolen from Romain Gary in white dog.
We are part of the planned obsolescence in front of robots without a soul who do not need to eat. Neither basil nor sun.
That our precious time…
Instagram: josee.blanchette